What Oscar-Nominated Brazilian Film I’m Still Here Can Teach Us About Resisting Fascism

Loosely, fascism describes a populist political system that centers one group, usually the “mainstream” one, via oppressive, authoritarian power. You know, like Brazil in the 1970s, when the Oscar Best Picture nominee "I’m Still Here" takes place.

Starring Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, the Portuguese-language film is based on the real-life story of Eunice Paiva. When the movie starts, she’s busy raising her five children, being a supportive partner to her ex-politician-turned-engineer husband Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), and bringing together a dynamic community of activists and thinkers. 

Then a group of armed men show up at her door in an unmarked car and take her husband with them. She never sees him again. 

It’s a big rupture. Yes, there were warning signs — Paiva was worried enough that she sent her eldest daughter out of the country with some family friends to keep her out of harm's way. But she did not prepare to suddenly be without her husband, the family’s sole breadwinner, particularly in a sexist society that doesn’t grant her equal property rights as her partner.

But Paiva reacts with perseverance, drawing a road map for resisting fascism in ways both big and small. In telling her story, "I’m Still Here" echoes these lessons, sometimes imperfectly, giving us access to her example but filtered through a flawed movie-making apparatus that teaches with its failures and its successes. As the United States is threatened with fascism, there’s much to learn from "I’m Still Here."

Paiva clearly gets a lot of satisfaction out of being a wife and mother. She presides over an unruly household with grace and the help of Maria José (Pri Helena), who does enough of the housework so that Paiva can play cards with her husband in the middle of the day. The Paiva matriarch makes souffle and hosts dinner parties, relishing her many social obligations.

When Rubens is disappeared, she of course worries first and foremost about his safety. But she also must return to running her household, which has become a different challenge altogether, and not just because they don’t have Rubens’ income. Paiva can’t even access their accounts without her husband’s signature, making the family suddenly destitute.

But Paiva attacks the problem with the same pragmatic warmth she used before. She remains present in her kids’ lives, staying dedicated to providing them the safest home she can. The rules have changed around her, but her core remains the same.

An upper-middle-class white woman, Paiva initially believes she’ll be able to continue her life as before. She goes to the bank but is unable to sweet-talk her contact there into helping her. Eventually, she starts going to their family friends — to figure out both what her husband was up to and for help dealing with the results. Those relationships turn out to be real, and she gets the support she needs.

And then she leaves. She knows she can’t raise her five kids on her own, so she takes her family from their picturesque Rio de Janiero beach house to an apartment in São Paulo. Her parents live there and are ready to help. It’s another rupture. At least one of the kids worries about what will happen if their father comes back and the family’s not there. Thankfully, the home they built together, so easily violated by their own government, does them one more solid: the sale provides Eunice with the nest egg she needs to start over, even if she has to do the transaction in cash to avoid complicit bankers.

The men who take Paiva’s husband leave a whole crew behind, occupying her house and eventually taking her and her daughter to a military prison. The two are quickly separated and Paiva is imprisoned for two weeks. The conditions are squalid; there’s no shower or change of clothes. She hears screams through the doors and regularly sits for inane interrogations. Thanks in part to a sympathetic guard, she keeps her cool and they eventually release her.

The experience is harrowing, but the horrors don’t end there. Her family remains under surveillance, and there’s no information about where her husband is. She has to trick the government into even admitting they have him.

But these experiences do not break her. Paiva rises to the moment. She figures out how to give her family what they need and even give Maria José her back pay. And then she decides to get her degree. She studies and becomes a human rights lawyer, advocating for her own family and others.

“I’m Still Here” charts this progression through a series of fast-forwards: after the immediate aftermath of her husband’s abduction, it skips decades into the future and decades again, showing us a transformed Paiva throughout the years.

The kidnapping is obviously the stuff of movies, but “I’m Still Here” would have been better served giving us more of Paiva’s story after figuring out basic survival for herself and her kids. What was returning to school like? Her professional path?

There are lessons and drama there, too. Paiva is unique in that she transformed her personal tragedy into activism, and the “how” not just the “what” of her story deserves to be told, too. For that, we’ll just have to rely on the sprawling book by Paiva’s son Marcelo Paiva, which the movie is based on, although it’s currently only available in Portuguese.

The film also falters in how it portrays race. More than half of the Brazilian population is Black or mixed with Black ancestry. But "I’m Still Here" rarely shows a Black face. Maybe that’s accurate for the Paiva’s class and social set, maybe it's true for Torres, director Walter Salles, and the other folks who made "I’m Still Here," too. And if so, we should learn from their mistakes, not their example.

The whole issue is further complicated by Torres having performed in blackface, a fact that surfaced during her Oscars campaign. She immediately apologized, but obviously Black Brazilians and Afro-Latines overall have reasons to be skeptical of white elites who cast themselves as heroes.

This type of racism is far too common in Latin America, and it complicates our ability to learn from the recent and further past. Torres, who is only the second Brazilian to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar (the first being her mother, Fernanda Montenegro), may just win this year. That sounds like a story to celebrate, but Torres's past actions make it more complicated. And she’s not the only one. 

Her chances are helped by the recent implosion of another barrier-breaking nominee. Karla Sofía Gascón is the first openly trans actress to be nominated for an Academy Award, but no one is expecting her to win after a journalist unearthed a series of Gascón’s nasty, racist tweets. That the Spanish actress then went rogue, forsaking Netflix’s advice, only further cemented the end of any goodwill she had left.

The thing with “firsts” is that they’re so limited. By nature, they are just one person, and one person is never enough. We need bigger systemic change than just the occasional crumb of representation. That’s not to say there isn’t stuff to learn from the firsts, especially with the limited stories we do get. But we need to take these lessons with a grain of salt, examining what’s in the frame and what’s left out, what went well and what didn’t. 

And then we need to advance differently, knowing what to replicate and what to avoid. That’s how we’ll get through this moment like Paiva and her children did theirs — not just by surviving but by actively resisting, with the examples of the past to guide us.